Corporate America: Purveyor of Inhuman “Rights”

U.S. Supreme Court Building
U.S. Supreme Court Building, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Photo by Farragutful

When you hear the word “rights” in the American corporate media, it is usually preceded by “Constitutional” rather than “human.”

 The Supreme Court has declared that corporations have the same rights as people. Their first declaration of this principle came as early as 1818 and most recently in 2010 in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case.

 The Citizens United decision serves the latest cabal of robber barons and further empowers the military industrial complex, which may be credited by the Court as having enough brain to exercise rights but has manifested little in regard to a heart.

 Indeed, in exercising their putative Constitutional rights, the profiteers of the military industrial complex have shown an enormous talent for crushing human rights both within the borders of the United States and in other lands wounded by US hegemony.

 In one of the latest examples of human rights violations in the US, the City of Detroit has been shutting off water to the poorest residents of the city, unable to pay their water bills.

 The shutoffs have been linked to a push towards privatization of the water system. Like the privatization of prison management, this effort is one more giant step forward in the rush to privatization that disproportionately violates the human rights of people of color and poverty in the U.S.

 Former President Jimmy Carter is appalled by the U.S. record on human rights violations.

How about you?

 Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

 

9/11 and the imminent demise of democracy

Realistically, we should remember that some people celebrated the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, with glee.

  • Their wildest dream was coming true.
  • All those millions of American TVs tuned in to death, destruction, and devastation.
  • All that fear and anger!
  • It was better even than the Gulf of Tonkin incident!

I am not talking about Arabs or Muslims, the vast majority of whom shared our horror and outrage on 9/11.

I am also not talking about the people our government brands as terrorists or potential terrorists, although terrorists these people may be.

I am talking about Americans, a select group of Americans within the military-industrial complex who profit from wars, who lust for power, who would sell out any of us and call it patriotism.

I am talking about Americans, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly greedy, who enjoy enormous power, who constitute the shadow government hiding, in many cases, behind the shirts of the best elected officials money can buy.

Those Americans watched the relentless videos of the collapse of the towers and saw dollar signs and weapons contracts. They saw a frightened and angry public ready to support the Patriot Act, which accelerated the theft of their rights, the suppression of their freedoms, the death of their democracy, and the empowerment of the shadowy National Security Agency. The overreaching of that agency should appall us all.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who praised Edward Snowden for releasing information about government spying, recently commented that “America is no longer a functioning democracy.”

If democracy is to be revived, if we are to have a fair chance at peace, we need to be critical consumers of the news–and we need to follow the money.

Who wants war and why? Who wants peace and why? What will benefit YOU?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

9/11 and just war

9-11 We Remember
U.S. Marines in Iraq remember 9/11. Image in public domain.

For most Americans, the words “September 11” continue to evoke fear, anger, distrust, and a desire to return to the way things used to be before we were attacked on our own soil.

September 11, 2011, we learned, to our horror, that we too, the golden people on the hill, are vulnerable.

In this blog, we have devoted several posts to just war principles.

Based on just war principles, can the attackers argue that the 9/11 assault on largely civilian sites in the US was justified?

We can say No in regard to many of those principles:

  • The attack was not undertaken as a last resort.
  • The attack was not committed by a legitimate authority.
  • The attack was committed in pursuit of a hopeless cause, which is considered not morally justifiable by just war principles. (Attacking the U.S. could be seen as a hopeless cause.)
  • Establishing peace was not the goal of the attack (as stated by Bin Laden himself).
  • The attackers did not discriminate between combatants and civilians; worse, they deliberately targeted civilians.

Whether the attack violated two other just war principles is a matter of debate. Specifically, for a war to be just:

  • It must have a just cause. Although some people around the world would argue that there was some truth to Bin Laden’s diatribe concerning American aggression against Muslims in the Middle East, the attacks were not undertaken to prevent or stop a genocide.
  • The violence inflicted must be proportional to the injury suffered. The death, pain, and destruction created by the attacks was tremendous. Was it disproportionately high in relation to any violence the U.S. might have been responsible for prior to the 9/11 attacks?

Finally, many proponents of just war principles in the U.S. (including President Jimmy Carter) have argued that the post 9/11 attack on Iraq by the U.S. was also not a just war.

As you consider the just war principles stated above, what do you think about this issue?  Was the US invasion of Iraq justified? How about the invasion of Afghanistan? How about US violence elsewhere in the Middle East since 9/11? Have these been just wars? If not, why is the US still killing people there?  And what are you going to do to stop it?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology